BabelWith.me Enters the Thai Conversation
Babeling away… can you hear me?…
BabelWith.me is a simple, free group chat tool that lets you communicate in one language or multiple languages (up to 45). Enjoy real-time conversations without language barriers – BabelWith.me automatically translates each message as you type.
BabelWith.me most likely uses Google Translate, so it should create many hilarious conversations when speaking with Thais. But as these are early days in the field of auto-translation, who knows what tomorrow will bring?
How to use BabelWith.me:
- Click ‘Start a Conversation’
- Choose your language
- Enter a nickname
- Type in your message
- Invite others (Facebook, twitter, email the url, etc)
You can even use it on your iPhone. Nice.
Enjoy…
Yet another new and useful way I can upset my girlfriend. I used an online translation thingamajig early on in our relationship and I wrote her a long email. I was so proud and I couldn’t wait to hear back from her.
It didn’t take long …she called me 5 minutes later with a lot of Why’s and hows and what you say. Apparently I somehow told her I wanted to push her off a house among other things…I’ll leave this for the more adventurous.
‘I wanted to push her off a house’
Oh dear! You are lucky that Ms Pookie is such a sweet thing :-D
When a combination of words can totally change the meaning, trouble is not far behind (Hmm… I wonder if I can get a bunch of those together for a post…)
I used to play around with Babel Fish Translate years back, only with French. If you put an English sentence into BF to get translated to French, then do it back again, what a mess. It’s funny, but in a messy kind of way. But no throwing people off of houses which is MUCH more exciting.
Interesting to say the least but having read Talen’s comment I think I will also leave it well alone. Thai is probably one of those languages that could indeed produce ‘push her off a house’ results with regularity. The Thai language of one word having many meanings, tonal tongue, could lead to many misunderstandings. I think a Thai/Western partnership using this would need a good understanding of each others language to decipher some very odd comments. Perhaps they could rename it BabbleWith.me. I checked out the About link and it quotes…. ‘LifeChurch.tv developed BabelWith.me to communicate with people around the globe.’
Excuse the pun but heaven forbid the kind of smutty conversations that are going to help fill the Church coffers. A good concept but I’m not sure if Thai will be one of its better tools.
Likewise… I’ve seen what Google Translate does to French translations, so I wouldn’t chance it in chats with Thais. Talen sums the dangers up perfectly! On the other hand, I’ve found it useful for translation in the other direction – you can usually get the gist of meaning from the result. This has allowed me to comment (in English) on a few twitters from Thais (in Thai) at times, and from the responses, it seems I wasn’t completely off the mark in understanding what they were on about.
One tip if you ever want to get any English translated into another language by automated software – use very short and simple sentences, where no ambiguity is possible. I’ve experimented with this from English to French, using different variations of a few sentences to express the same meaning. Some (the short, simple versions) were translated almost perfectly. But longer, convoluted versions mostly ended up as complete gibberish in French.
Martyn – ‘Excuse the pun but heaven forbid the kind of smutty conversations that are going to help fill the Church coffers’
Lordy, lordy do you have that one right! All of the guys who have asked me about good email translators were not concerned about chatting with their aunties :-D
Peter – ‘use very short and simple sentences’
That is an excellent idea. So just use the baby chatter that we first learn in a language.
It makes a lot of sense because the simple sentences will be the first ones that Google will sort out.
From what I read on Rikker’s site (?), Google asks people to send in Google translations that are wrong. So eventually Google will work their way through the smaller sentences and on to the larger more complicated ones.
(nice to see you here Peter)